Arctic ‘soon will be ice-free in the summer’

SCIENTISTS returning from the world’s biggest mission to the North Pole have warned that the Arctic is “dying” and will soon be ice-free in the summer.

The expedition, which set off last September and docked in Germany yesterday, found i ce that was “badly eroded, melted, thin and brittle”, Markus Rex, the mission leader, said.

The £136 million Polarstern expedition was organised to better understand the Arctic and help scientists predict the impacts of climate change.

Mr Rex said: “We witnessed how the Arctic Ocean is dying. We saw this process right outside our windows, or when we walked on the brittle ice.”

A rotating team of more than 300 scientists from 20 countries including the UK spent months camping on a large ice floe, taking ice and water samples.

Early results in February suggested that ice observed at the end of last September was “exceptionally thin” compared to earlier polar studies.

In a research paper the team said that ice floes were not travelling as far as in the past, which could have consequences for the Arctic ecosystem.

The expedition was disrupted in the spring by the pandemic, which forced it to redraw plans to fly in a new team to relieve the existing scientists, as flights were cancelled around the world.

Thomas Krumpen, a sea ice physicist, said a full analysis could take a decade to complete. So far, recorded temperature changes have been more extreme at the poles than elsewhere on Earth, with the Arctic warming the most quickly.